To be Blunt, it’s witty but amoral
ALMOST 30 years ago Alan Bennett paired two single-act plays about members of the Cambridge spy ring to make an ostensibly comic evening, Single Spies.
The title cleverly conveys the loneliness of the plays’ subjects, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt.
The first half, An Englishman Abroad, is an extended, romanticised vignette: traitor Burgess in Moscow exile, entertaining London actress Coral Browne (Belinda Lang) to a sparse lunch.
Nicholas Farrell’s Burgess is homesick, threadbare, a sorry drunk. He asks his fur-coated visitor to order him a Savile Row suit. He begs her for London gossip. Mr Farrell, blotchy-faced, crumpled, swaying in voluminous bags, is excellent – despite a bad wig.
Mr Bennett’s elegant writing may be dotted with witty aphorisms – about how in England you only have to live to 90 to win the Nobel Prize, etc – but this Burgess feels incomplete.
Where is his ruthlessness? Did gay Mr Bennett hesitate to be more truthful because he sympathised with the gay Burgess?
A Question Of Attribution, after the interval, is a stronger play. Blunt, art expert to the Queen in the post-war years, discusses counterfeit pictures.
He discovers a hidden figure in a painting attributed to Titian – but maybe there are two other concealed presences on the canvas.
Blunt’s past as a Russian spy is known by the authorities but they have not yet exposed him. Bennett, writing long before The Audience, gives us a fascinating scene when Blunt (David Robb) talks to the Queen ( Miss Lang). Monarch asks faithless subject about fakes. He replies with talk of enigmas.
Mr Robb’s Blunt has a subtle, uneasy fruitiness. Is there almost a touch of poor Anthony Eden to him?
Mr Farrell reappears, again to fine effect, as a detective. Miss Lang could do with broadcasting a little less in both roles, although at least she is audible. This is not always the case at the barnlike Birmingham Rep.
Blunt remarks that deceit becomes more obvious with time. In a few years’ time we may be struck by the amorality with which the talented but facetious Alan Bennett treated traitors Burgess and Blunt.